Greeting the Angels : An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process (Death, Value and Meaning Series) (Death, Value & Meaning)

...the dead teach the bereaved how to mourn them... This book, written in the genre of Imaginal Psychology, presents the imaginal dimension of the mourning process. The "angels" it greets are the interior figures who greet the bereaved during the course of their mourning process. In memory, reverie, and dream, images of the dead return to heal and be healed. As the bereaved enter into relationship with these images, the grief in which they are sequestered is particularized and individualized into the precise nuances of significance which make mourning possible.

Just as a poet creates culture by embodying in verse what would be lost forever, the mourning process presents the bereaved with the images through which the love that they do not wish to give up, may be perpetuated.

Regardless of whether the bereaved are religious or not, mourning immerses them in a spiritual process. Even when the mourner is bereft of the religious containers that provide cultural support for grief and loss, the mourning process can create out of itself the culture necessary to the performance of its mysteries.

As the dead teach the bereaved how to mourn them, they are simultaneously woven into the fabric of what it means to be human. In elucidating these and other themes related to the inner world of mourning, the author, a practicing psychotherapist, draws upon dreams, biographical fragments, poetry, psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology. The style is at once expository and evocative, appealing to both the head and the heart.